


Pokémon: Hub and Pokémon: Rim

by Emilem



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Gym Leaders - Freeform, Other, Pokemon AU, The Hedgehog Song
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-13 00:09:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 14,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18457460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emilem/pseuds/Emilem
Summary: We all know that, somewhere in the multiverse, all possible realities exist.  So doesn't it stand to reason that somewhere out there, the Disc is just another Pokémon region?These ficlets represent snapshots of what a journey in A Discworld-based Pokémon game would look like.  They are not in chronological order, and it is entirely up to the reader whether they are moments from the same playthrough, or even whether the Disc is one region or many.I started this project a couple of years ago, and I was gonna post it when I'd completed thirty prompts, but I had to stop because my laptop broke. Earlier today I found an old save file that I didn't realise I had and thought, hey, maybe someone will enjoy this.  Please let me know if that someone is you!





	1. Prompt: pokédex

There’s nothing quite like a pressing need to be stealthy to make you feel like every step you take is deafening.

I wince and look up as the rocks underneath my feet make another unwelcome “llch” noise. Between the twigs of the bushes at the side of the mountain path ahead, I see that most of the Lemmink are still jumping off the ledge in the path of their migration. A few, however, have stopped waddling along in order to look around suspiciously at the bushes I’m hiding behind. I’ll have to give them a minute to calm down before I keep going forward.

I’ve been closing in on the migrating group of so-called Vermine pokémon for a little more than half an hour, trying my absolute hardest not to spook them. The black-and-white rodents are famously wary of humans, for much the same reason that a lot of posh Discians often look like they’re wearing forty or so Lemmink sown together.

In fact, Lemmink have responded to their gradual approach to extinction by being incredibly wary about _everything_. This is why the group I’m currently watching jump over the ledge in their migration path are doing so by abseiling on knotted-together vines that look strong enough to hold a human’s weight, despite the ledge being about ten inches in height.

I decide it’s safe to move by now, and I’m able to place the tip of my toe on the only spot on the ground without any noisy scenery getting in the way. This gives me the confidence to take another step, then another. One more good lunge though this bush and I should be able to -

“BINGLY BINGLY BEEP! BINGLY BINGLY BEEP! BINGLY BINGLY BEEP!”

The tinny sound bellowing from my back pocket takes me so drastically by surprise that I fall heavily into the road, taking half a dozen large branches with me. The Lemmink group erupts into a chorus of squeaks and dive over the tiny ledge in front of them as one. Their squeals get quieter and quieter until it becomes clear I shouldn’t even bother looking over the edge.

I let off a few choice swearwords and take my pokédex out of my back pocket. The device’s screen is in its transparent setting, letting me see the dark-blue face of the creature enthusiastically screaming at me from inside.

“...gly bingly beep! Bingly bingly -”

"Yes, Dex, I’ve got you out now. What is it?”

“Good afternoon, Insert Name Here!” The little pokémon’s smile stretches disconcertingly from one side of the screen to the other. “You have: one appointments today! Three forty five pee em - meeting with Queen Magrat at Lancre Castle. Where: Lancre Castle. When: Three forty five pee em-”

“I know I’ve got to go to Lancre Castle, Dex. I was there when the Witch told us that this morning.”

“Oh!” Dex’s brow furrows. He touches something in front of him that fills the screen with colour until it looks like a map of the Disc region, with one blue dot and one red dot flashing in the mountain ranges towards the map’s centre. “But see, you’re here, where the blue dot is, whereas Lancre Castle is-”

“I know where Lancre Castle is, too! I was just hoping to catch some Lemmink during the _three and a half hours_ before I have to get there!”

The screen’s colours fade away again to show a tremendously excited little blue face. “Wow! I didn’t know that there were Lemmink here!”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to work that out _for_ me, Dex!”

Dex looks at me with a tremendously patronising expression on his face. “I don’t think the internet is going to work in a mountain range, Insert Name Here.”

My voice is starting to get sore, as is my patience. “Not by using the internet, you idiot! You’re a pokédex! Having a Habitat List is supposed to be your whole _thing_!”

Dex’s face lights up with excitement again. “Oh yeah! I’ll be back in no time!” His face disappears again, as the pokédex’s screen cycles through pictures of all the pokémon I’ve seen on my journey so far. I imagine I’ll be waiting a while.

I sigh and kick one of the branches at my feet. I did ask for a regular pokédex, but Professor Ridcully had insisted...

When the scientists of the Alola region announced that they had found a way to get Rotom to inhabit a pokédex and improve its functions, most of the world had been quietly impressed. Those at the Unseen University in the Disc region had instead seen it as a challenge. A tinkering group of pokémon professors there had said, well, Rotom isn’t the only pokémon who can posses electrical devices. Impeed, a dark/fairy pokémon found in Agatea City, has been taking over people’s watches and cameras for as long as the region has had watches and cameras, so it’s bound to be able to fit in a pokédex. Not only that, but the blue imp pokémon can be born with Sketch as an egg move, a technique which lets the pokémon copy anything that it sees another pokémon do. Surely, the professors said, a pokémon who can learn anything is a pokémon that could do... everything.

And so they created the ‘Impokédex,’ the device currently sitting in my hand, and it turns out they were right; Impeed can do anything a pokédex can do. What the professors hadn’t considered is whether Impeed can do anything _well_.

The one in my pokédex reappears with a face full of doubt. “I guess Lemmink aren’t found too far from here, but I don’t see any around here. Are you sure you didn’t see a tree?”

“Of course there aren’t any around here, you useless thing, you scared them off!”

“Hey!” the Impeed says with an offended tone. “You can’t call me useless. I’m state-of-the-craft technology. If it weren’t for me, you probably wouldn’t even know they were called Moomink!” 

"Lemmink!"

Dex’s head darts around. “Lemmink? Where?”

I count to ten under my breath and wonder how much pokédexes are selling for on pBay. “You know what, Dex, you’re right. I must have mistaken a tree for a six-inch-tall pokémon. Look, just delete the reminder about Queen Magrat, will you? I’ll remember it myself.”

“Okay, Insert Name Here,” says the Impeed, turning himself off. I put the pokédex back in my back pocket, shake my head and walk up to the ledge; maybe I can still see some Lemmink from up there.

I get to the spot the Lemmink were jumping from. I’m just taking a step to inspect the abseiling vines when -

“BINGLY BINGLY BEEP!”

The noise makes me stumble over the ledge, landing face-first in a patch of grass. Muffled by my back pocket, I hear Dex shout;

“Well done, Insert Name Here! You just travelled from: route seventeen to: route sixteen. Make sure to tread quietly - apparently, you can sometimes find wild Lemmink passing through this route!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This wasn't always my first chapter, but I just decided it works better here and since the chapter order is arbitrary I didn't see a reason not to move it


	2. Prompt: Starter

Ptraci withdraws her fallen Mathemamel to its poké ball and puts it in her pocket, a feat I wouldn’t have thought possible given that's was wearing nothing but the two smallest and least practical articles of clothing I’ve seen in my life. In the Mathemamel’s place, Djelibeybi City’s gym leader sends out Spheline, a Ground/Flying type beast who flexes her whiskers at my pokémon and meows angrily.

It looks like it’s time for me to switch out Wahooney. The spiny little grass-type has been performing admirably against the rest of Ptraci’s ground-type team, but it’s unlikely that he’ll perform quite as well against the creature my pokédex refers to as “the Riddling Pokémon.” If the intimidating winged creature has any flying-type moves, he’s a goner.

There is one member of my party, though, who’ll still have an advantage against Spheline. And he happens to be the one I’ve been training longer and more successfully than any other Pokémon.

Which is unfortunate, given the circumstances.

“Um,” I say, feeling tremendously awkward. “We couldn’t... move this battle to a lower floor, could we?”

“What?” Ptraci’s forehead crinkles with annoyance. “Djelibeybi gym leaders have always fought challengers on the top floor of the pyramid. It’s traditional. Besides, all the bottom floors are full of mazes.”

“Right, yeah, I can respect that,” I mumble, trying to find the best way to phrase the problem. Nobody ever had this issue in the video games. “It’s just, uh, the thing about a pyramid is, it’s a lot narrower at the top than it is at the bottom, so...”

Ptraci’s brow unfurrows quickly, like a snapping bungee cord - the tension might technically be gone, but nobody’s any happier for it. “Let me guess,” she seethes. “You picked A’teenie as your starter pokémon, didn’t you.”

I nod, feeling like a terrible nuisance. “How’d you guess?”

She scoffs and walks towards the wall behind her. “Please. You think you’re special? A third of the trainers in this region pick the water type. It’s lucky for you,” she says, pressing hard against one of the darker stones that make up the wall, “that tradition can be flexible.”

The stone she pressed makes a ‘click’ noise. A soft pitter-patter sound can be heard downstairs, like someone in sandals running very quickly, followed by the grinding noise of some cogs being painstakingly turned. Then, ever so slowly, the wall to my left breaks away from the rest of the pyramid and folds downwards on horribly squeaky hinges. This goes on for quite a long time, until the wall juts out and hangs over the rest of the town like a balcony.

I understand instantly, and let Titantle out of his ball into the open air just outside the gym. Ever since I fully-evolved my once-tiny starter pokémon, he has never failed to take my breath away. The World Turtle Pokémon looks so enormous and majestic in the air outside that it’s hard to believe I could have attributed the word ‘intimidating’ to Spheline just moments ago. After all, the head looming in through the space a wall used to be is so large that I’ve quite comfortably crawled into some of his wrinkles. Just having him in the vicinity causes a light breeze to wash over the battlefield, since he has to flap fins that are the size of my entire body to stay airborne. And it’s not even possible to see the most impressive thing about Titantle from here; hidden from view by the angle we’re looking up at him and by the three remaining walls of the pyramid, his back is shaped into land masses, mountain ranges and oceans, so realistic that I’ve found smaller pokémon living there.

Ptraci sighs. “I swear, before I became gym leader, people would look at this gym and think ‘gosh, the turtle pokémon that’s seven bloody meters across might struggle to fit into the top of that building. Maybe I should switch some of my party members around.’ But then the video games and that damned Ash Ketchum documentary came out, and all of a sudden nobody ever _thinks_. Everyone just assumes a solution will magically happen, and now I have to spend half my salary to make someone open the side of a centuries-old building every other day.”

I squirm apologetically. “I’m really sorry.”

She shrugs. “I should have been a gym leader in Kalos,” she says, wistfully. “All the Kalos starter pokémon are _tiny_.”


	3. Prompt: Rival

I have to hand it to Eegore - her hunched body survives being trampled by my rival’s pokémon for at least the first thirty or so legs. She does, however, eventually collapse to the floor, emitting a strangled “thhhhhhhhh” noise that puts me in mind of a large balloon having the air forcefully squeezed out of it. I wait patiently for the opponent’s remaining legs to kick themselves off poor Eegore’s unconscious body and return to the other side of the battlefield, then return my pokémon to her ball. Once again, the Loggage stands victorious.

The Travelling Trunk pokémon’s cavernous mouth creaks open very slightly, revealing sycamore-white teeth set in a disturbing grin that’ll stay in my mind’s eye long after I go to bed tonight. I consider my next move very nervously. I don’t have too many options; my rival’s starter pokémon has already knocked out three members of my party, and that doesn't even include my own starter, whose double disadvantage as a Water/Ground type make him practically unusable here. I swear, Loggage gave me more than enough trouble last time I saw him, when he was just a Followood. Since then, evolution has granted him the secondary typing of steel, meaning he only has two weaknesses, neither of which are currently in my party. That, coupled with a high attack and catastrophically powerful moveset, make Loggage a force to be reckoned with.

Of course, one of the problems is that I can’t work out what that catastrophic moveset actually is. My rival and his first pokémon are so in sync, the man doesn’t even have to call out moves any more; Loggage just knows exactly what his owner expects of him. I find this very impressive, but mostly inconvenient. I’m not used to relying on so much conjecture to work out why my pokémon have lost consciousness.

Half his moves, at least, are guessable. I’m fairly certain the move where he sat really still and glowed ominously was Iron Defence. At least, I hope so; if his stats are this high naturally, I might as well give up now. And I’m fairly certain that the one in which he takes his target into his enormous mouth and then spits them back out again is Crunch. (If I am wrong about this last guess, it doesn’t matter too much - Eegore Disabled the move when she entered the combat.)

But the other two moves are really causing me trouble. He has one particularly powerful attack where he jumps into the air, to a height that he shouldn’t be nearly aerodynamic enough to reach, before falling onto the target with the impact of a small meteor. I’d initially assumed this attack had to be either a fighting or flying-type move. However, judging by how much damage it did to Squizz, my Curious Squid pokémon, I was forced to conclude that it must actually be a grass-type move. What kind of grass-type attack involves that kind of movement? Maybe Wood Hammer, I guess, but I’ve never come across a pokémon before who uses their entire body as the hammer.

And finally, there’s the move that’s just been used to beat Eegore. Eegore is part ghost type, so that tells me that the move in question can’t be a normal-type or fighting-type move. This definitely narrows down the list of moves that it makes sense for it to be, which would be helpful, if that list had had more than one attack on it - that attack being Stomp, a normal-type move. Now all I have is an empty list, with no way of knowing if it’s an attack that’ll knock out my next pokémon in one trample.  
I’ll have to swallow my pride and ask his owner.

“Hey, Rincewind? What move did Loggage just use?”

Rincewind looks like he’s been caught cheating on a test. “Umm. Crunch? It was probably Crunch.”

“What?” I blink. It’s possible I was being charitable when I thought they were so in sync. “It can’t have been Crunch. His mouth never opened.”

“Right, right.” He scratches his head. “Uh... might have been Vine Whip?”

“That makes even less sense!” I cry. “Hold on - hasn’t he forgotten Vine Whip? He hasn’t used it since you first got him.”

“Oh. Well, maybe he remembered it."

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Do you have any control over Loggage’s moves at all?”

He considers this as though he’s answering a deep philosophical question. “Do you know, I’m sure I used to. Maybe I still would if I asked nicely. But I don’t really see the point. Ever since I stopped trying, the fights have been getting finished a lot quicker.”

“But... don’t you feel... I don’t know, left out?”

Rincewind looks at me with an expression filled with sympathy. “Look,” he says, “I can respect your pride, and I’m sure it works really well for you, but I’ve tried it out and it’s not for me. All I’m really interested in is trying to stop people from trying to attack me as quickly as possible. If that means letting Loggage do his own thing, I can’t say I mind.”

He gestures towards the battlefield with his head. “Speaking of which, shall we get on with it? I’m sure you’ll find a way to beat us sooner or later.” He sighs, wistfully. “You usually do.”

... Which is true, admittedly, but there's something quite discomforting about knowing that it's the Pokémon who has been so close to outmanoeuvring me this whole time, not its trainer. I try to shake the feeling off, and carefully choose my next Pokémon.


	4. Prompt: Fire

Ponder and I wait for the Watch to take away the many Grunts we just beat together, then collapse in an exhausted heap.

I pat Squizz on his favourite spot above his huge, inquisitive eyes, and I nod towards Ponder’s starter pokémon, now a fully-evolved Bookook. All 300 pounds of the Orang-Utan pokémon’s body are resting effortlessly on his knuckles, giving the impression that he’s floating in the air. He “ook”s a greeting towards me.

“Good job on training your pokémon. They’re really strong,” I say to Ponder, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice. As Professor Ridcully’s assistant, I hadn't expected Ponder to have had much time to toughen his pokémon up.

Ponder blinks, looking like he’s not used to being complimented about anything. “Thanks! Obviously, I got really lucky with his nature and IVs, but I’m still really happy with how he’s turning out. I spent a long time EV training him to make sure he has the best special attack and defence possible, while keeping his speed low so he can make best use of his Trick Room manoeuvre. And of course, it wasn’t too hard to choose my team around his typing’s weaknesses.”

“Yeah,” I smile, trying to act like I know what EV training is. The little man’s so excited by the needless complexity of it all, I imagine it would upset him terribly to know I catch my pokémon based mostly on whether they make me laugh. “I still find it weird that Bookook is fire/electric type, though.”

Strangely, saying this makes Ponder flinch. He pauses for a few seconds, like he’s choosing his words carefully. “Yes,” he says, slowly, “It’s certainly interesting that he isn’t part psychic type, given the largely mental nature of his offensive skills. But as I understand it, the typing reflects his defensive capabilities, which are enhanced by the magical field he puts around himself, which is electromagnetic. Of course, this reduces his weaknesses while still expanding his potential moveset - ingenuetive, really.”

I feel like one of us has misunderstood something in this conversation, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s the one of us that uses words like ‘ingenuitive.’ “Right,” I reply, slowly. “That’s not what I meant, though. With all that muscle, I was sure he was at least part fight-”

“NO!” Ponder screams to interrupt me, desperately. I stop, but I must look confused, because he continues, “You can’t say he looks like that type. He’ll think you’re comparing him to a Mankey.”

"What-” I stop myself. The fear in Ponder’s eyes tells me I don’t really need to know what’s wrong with Mankeys. “What... would make me think that? Bookook’s so much stronger, and more impressive.”

Bookook loosens muscles I didn’t even see him flex. Ponder breathes a sigh of relief; I feel like a crisis has been averted.

“If anything,” I continue, having hit my stride, “he’s more like an Infernape.” 

I’ll probably regain consciousness soon.


	5. Prompt: normal

The white light of evolution hasn’t even stopped bouncing off the surrounding trees before I’m excitedly rustling through the grass all over the route, doing my very best to attract some wild pokémon. I’ve been waiting to have this pokémon for several months now and I’m not waiting any longer to use her in battle than I need to.

While I eagerly run through the tall grass, I glance over my shoulder to admire my newly-evolved pokémon, who glides along behind me. Evolution has done wonders for her elegance; as an un- evolved Origameow, her paper-thin body was contorted into such an awkward, vaguely Skitty- esque shape that it could barely move its legs, and could only walk in a very specific circular path. In evolution, however, the creature has reshaped itself completely into a beautiful bird, her wings reinforced by what appears to be an open, snow-white ‘season’s greetings’ card. Sprouting from the end of her wings are long, thin feathers with ink-black markings, which more than double her wingspan. While I’m looking back at her, she opens up the lipstick-marked envelope flap which acts at her beak in order to trill quietly.

Taking a quick moment to catch my breath, I decide to prod my pokédex into telling me what it has to say about her.

“SWALKRANE!” The machine tells me, cheerily. “The LETTERBIRD Pokémon! Normal/Flying type. The feathers of this creature’s wings are strips of lost pieces of mail. Hushed sounds are sometimes heard being passed between wild Swalkrane, thought to be the echoes of long- forgotten love letters being written.”

I smile; the description only makes the adorable pokémon cuter. I’ve wanted one of these ever since I faced Moist Von Lipwig, the Gym Leader of Morpork City, who used one as his last pokémon and eviscerated half my team with it. I remember being caught off-guard not only by the Swalkrane’s powerful Double Hit and Hurricane attacks, but by his signature ability, “Rock Paper Scissors.” At the expense of making them weak against steel-type moves, the ability makes the pokémon’s normal-type moves super effective against rock-type pokémon. This was bad news for me at the time, since my rock-type Splatroll was the only advantage on my team against the flying- type gym.

Even more excitingly, if the rumours are true, Moist also has in his team an Angeletter, Swalkrane’s almost mythical evolved form. Supposedly, the pokémon is so powerful that Moist only uses her in battle against Champions returning to his gym, and is so rare that nobody else knows how to get Swalkrane to evolve in the first place. If Moist himself knows how he achieved the evolution, the mischievous young man refuses to tell anyone, offering only the infuriating half-clue that “you only get one.” I’d find the idea of evolving one myself appealing just to see what that little bugger looks like without a smug grin on his face.

But that’s all still to come. In the meantime, I’ve just spotted a wild pokémon - Ga’goyg, the gargoyle pokémon, a hunched, rough-skinned creature with water pouring out of his permanently open mouth. A rock/water type pokémon, he’s the perfect pokémon to test out Swalkrane and her ability. I point at the will pokémon and shout, “Swalkrane! Use Quick Attack!” Swalkrane obligingly lowers her thin head, gives her wings two decisive flaps and zooms forward to slam into her opponent’s body.

Her body bounces off Ga’goyg’s left shoulder with a rather pathetic ‘dink’ noise. She flaps slowly back to her side of the field, trying to shake off an awkward crease which has appeared in her tail. The wild Ga’goyg slowly shifts his head to scrape his chin against his chest, as if he’s trying to scratch an itch where Swalkrane hit him. Other than that, he barely seems to have noticed the attack at all.

Huh.

I check my pokédex to see if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick; maybe this Swalkrane has some kind of Hidden Ability for some reason, or I’m wrong about Ga’goyg being a rock-type. But no; the pokédex happily shouts that “it’s super effective!”, against all evidence to the contrary.

Before I can think about this too long, the wild Ga’goyg lumbers forward - a manoeuvre which involves a lot of creaking - and pivots around until he’s facing away from Swalkrane. As he does so, the two little stumps on his back flash a silvery colour, before growing into a small blade which reaches out and slices across Swalkrane’s back.

From context, I think the wild pokémon must have used Steel Wing, because it knocks my pokémon out instantly.

As I dig out Swalkrane’s premier ball and return her to it, feeling a little dazed, five thoughts occur to me in quick succession.

1\. A pokémon that really impressed me when I was facing my second pokémon gym doesn’t actually have any guarantee of still seeming good now, when my pokémon have all evolved and I’m two gyms away from the Elite Four.

2\. Making certain moves super-effective against a certain type isn’t actually all that useful if the pokémon using them has a low attack stat and they’re rubbish moves to begin with.

3\. As abilities go, trading one weakness for another is not actually all that useful.

4\. There might be a reason why only one trainer has ever bothered with this pokémon for long enough to get it to evolve.

5\. That damn Moist von Lipwig is going to get to be smug for a little longer. 

Ah well, I grumble under my breath. At least she’s pretty.


	6. Prompt: Fighting

“Feeglet, use Brick Break!”

A five-inch flash of vivid blue rage sails through the air with an aggressive surge of energy as my Feeglet catapults into the air, colliding forehead first with Elder Soto’s Monkool’s nose. Icy blue blood spurts out of one of the Monkool’s nostrils and onto the black-and-chrome markings on his chest, which goes a little way to relieve the illusion that the Ice/Fighting pokémon is either wearing a cuttingly sharp suit or a hooded black monk’s robe, depending which way you look at him. Then, with a slightly strangled “yooo” noise, the bipedal creature keels over and drops to the floor, unconscious. The battle has been won.

Soto nods respectfully as he hands over my winnings for the match, and behind him, I sense that Gym Leader Lu-Tze is staring directly at me and grinning. Most of my attention, though, is still taken by my Feeglet. With an enthusiastic “ding!” from my pokédex, the tattooed little pokémon has reached the level that male Feeglet evolve into Nacmack, and from the looks of it, the fact isn’t lost on this one. In all the time I’ve had Feeglet on my team, this is the first time I’ve seen that tiny blue face with an expression I couldn’t describe as “aggressive.” The swirling designs tattooed on the pokémon’s cheeks are crinkled beyond recognition by the smile stretching between them, under two eyes bursting with anticipation. Arms half the size of toothpicks are stretched out welcomingly as the pokémon stares at the heavens, waiting to be engulfed by the light of evolution.

I cough, awkwardly. “Umm... It’s not going to happen. Sorry.”

The words seem to take a second to register; then those half-toothpick arms are lowered, and I’m being looked at like I’ve broken wind at a funeral. Then a sharp voice asks, “ach, _will_ it nae, lassie?”

I gulp, involuntarily. Any pokémon that speaks in a decipherable language puts me on edge a little; it’s hard to feel particularly in control in any battle where the creatures carrying out your orders can heckle you. I say, “I’m afraid not. Not today, anyway, and not into a Nacmack.”

Feeglet continues looking at me with a stare that could curdle cheese. “Big Mack did,” the little creature says, pointing at a great ball on my belt. And sure enough, the first Feeglet I caught evolved a little more than a week ago. Technically, the evolution hadn’t done that much to change him; he gained an inch in height, one or two slightly darker tattoos, but otherwise looked much the same. The only big difference had been that he now carries another creature around by the leg, so that he can hit opponents with it. Nobody seems at all sure what this creature is, except that it looks a little like a white mareep and goes “eeeeeh” when it’s swung.

“Yes, he did,” I agree, trying not to sound like the idiot I’m being treated as. “But you see, you’re female.” I say this with a certain degree of uncertainty. My pokédex insists that it’s biologically the case, but the little creature does everything they can to avoid using female pronouns about themself, in a way that makes me feel like I should avoid them too; then again, they’re also significantly more intelligent than any male Feeglet I’ve come across, so male pronouns don’t seem right either. I continue swiftly to the bits I know I haven’t got wrong. “Female Feeglets don’t evolve until five levels later, and only when they have at least two other members of the Feeglet evolution line in your party. I read about it online."

There’s a pointed silence. Feeglet is looking at me like this news is entirely my fault. I shift a little and add, “Apparently you’re meant to hit the other two on the head, and then it happens.”

A few seconds go by, and I grow all the more desperate to fill the silence. “But the good news is, when you do evolve, you’ll be a Keldame! And Keldame are _really_ strong. They’re fairy/psychic types, which is great combination, and they have loads of health and a high special attack, and -”

“I willnae.”

Oh dear.

“What?” I say, weakly, even though I know I heard them perfectly well.

“I. Will. Nae. It isnae me. I’m no’ gonnae be yer Keldame.” Feeglet’s arms are crossed tightly across their body.

I deflate a little. “But I thought you’d _want_ to be a Keldame,” I protest. “Feeglet and Nacmack are meant to respect them.” I’d been really looking forward to having a Keldame. The round, wise pokémon is meant to be brilliant, in a scary way.

“I respect the sun, too, ye ken,” Feeglet explains. “I dinnae want to be one o’ them, neither. I’m a Nacmack Feeglet. I drink, steal an’ fight - I need tae get mah hands dirty. You cannae gie me the magic o’ the minds. It’ll tak’ all the fun out ae life.”

“I wouldn’t make you learn any psychic attacks if you wouldn’t want to,” I say. “You’d still be able to keep your fighting moves.”

“And then ye’d chuck me innae computin’ box because I’m not as useful to ye wi’oot the mind magic, I’ll bet? Besides, Keldames are all mothers, ye ken. I don’t want tae be cooped up and shootin’ out sprogs all mah life. It’s nae geas for me.”

It takes me a second to guess what ‘geas’ and ‘sprogs’ mean in this context, but then I say, “But that doesn’t have to be your job! I wouldn’t need you to have babies at all.”

“Oh, so it’s nae sex for me now, an’ all? Ta, bigjob, you’re really sellin’ it for me.”

I’m starting to feel quite helpless. I can’t exactly force them to evolve; they’d stage a revolt, and the rest of the Feeglet family respect Keldame so much that I’d never be able to use any of them again. “Well, what exactly can I do for you, then? I mean, even if I release you, someone’s eventually going to want to evolve you.”

Feeglet rolls their eyes at me, like the solution shop be obvious. “Put me innae box.”

I blink in surprise - that’s not a request I get often. “I thought you didn’t want to be put in a box?”

“Not as a Keldame, nay. I couldnae be havin' wi’ everyone goin’ aboot respectin’ me, an' the like. But as a Feeglet, ye can put me in with wee Lettie there,” They say, pointing at the repeat ball which contains my other Feeglet, the one I was only carrying around to help this one evolve. “Then, the two of us can hang aboot in the box and be a wee Feeglet clan. Keep yer other pokémon on their toes. Big Mack can join in when yer not usin’ him, an’ all.”

I shrug; I don’t think I’m going to get much of a say in this. “Go on then,” I grumble. “Let’s get you to a P.C.”

Typical. 95 percent of Feeglets are male, and I still managed to find one that’s non-binary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note to any Scottish readers: I ran this by a Scottish beta tester a little while ago, but please let me know if you have any corrections to my Feegle dialogue!


	7. Prompt: Electric

“Go, Clockoo,” I shout, throwing forward the Premier Ball that my Timekeeper pokémon has resided in ever since he was a little baby Cucwatch. The pokémon hovers in the air in front of me and casts a little birdhouse-shaped shadow over his opponent, with the arms of his clock face set to the twenty-minutes-to-four position, which I’ve always considered to be his Determined Expression.

The wild Leopant is clearly intimidated by her more experienced foe, but she starts the battle off by hissing and kicking up dirt into a Mud-Slap attack. Of course, since it’s a ground-type move, the mud shoots right under Clockoo’s body with no effect. Honestly, though, I can’t blame the wild Snow Leopard pokémon for not realising her opponent was part flying type. After all, for all intents and purposes, Clockoo is basically a box.

Well, not quite ALL intents and purposes.

“Clockoo, use Wild Charge!” I cry. In response, the minute hand of Clockoo’s clock face starts whizzing backwards at a great speed as he winds himself up. Then, a little hatch opens up right above the number six drawn on the clock face, and a little dark-brown bird shape rockets out, leaving a wide trail of yellow sparks in its wake. With a crackle sound, he hits his opponent right at the point on her hindquarters where orange and black markings give the illusion that the otherwise white-and-grey pokémon is wearing a pair of stripy boxer shorts. The little bird creature bounces off his target, taking recoil damage before hopping back across the field as the electricity makes the Leopant convulse wildly on the floor. Satisfied, he jumps back behind the hatch of the other half of his body.

I mean... his nest? I guess? Honestly, I’m still not sure if the clock is part of his body or not.

It feels silly to say it like that. I mean, I’ve read his pokédex entry. I know that the pokémon’s little birdhouse-shaped box and the clock on its front surface are constructed by Clockoo, both as defensive nests and to attract mates. (It’s taken hundreds of years of natural selection for the birds to put the numerals in the right place.)

But... I swear, it reacts too much to the world around it for it not to seem alive, from the way the clock’s hands turn immediately to a big, ten-minutes-to-two grin when I stroke his sloping roof, to the way his ticking gets aggressively faster when one of my other pokémon is annoying him. When he’s in battle, the “1” and “11” numerals actually seem to shorten themselves, like eyes narrowing in concentration. You could make an argument that the Clockoo could have built the box to do all these things when he wanted it to, but the box even does all those things when the bird is outside his hatch. If he was that good of an engineer, I feel like he wouldn’t mix up the numbers 9 and 6 whenever I ask him to show me the actual time.

I think I’m going to keep treating the clock and the bird as two halves of the same creature, but I don’t know if I’d admit this to an ornithologist. Or a psychologist.

Back in the battle, Leopant uses Ice Fang, her jaws clenching around Clockoo’s side and rapidly cooling until the wood on either side of the clock starts to splinter. It’s a powerful move, and one that’s super-effective against the electric/flying type, but it’s not powerful enough to win Leopant the match. It’s time for Clockoo to finish her off.

“Arial Ace!” I shout, and - against all known rules of aviation - Clockoo’s box raises higher into the air, to the _thud_ sound of wings flapping against the inside of the clock. When it reaches a great enough height, the box drops onto Leopant roof-first, flinging her body several feet away into the slopes of Mt. Celesti. It’ll be a while before she gets back up again.

I grin at Clockoo’s victory and pick a poké bean out of my bag to feed him in reward. “Well done, Clocky,” I say, throwing it to him.

“BONG,” he agrees, happily.

I blink. That noise is new. Maybe this means he’s close to evolving into a Cucrandad.

Great. As if I don’t already overthink his independently moving components, now I’ll have a bloody _pendulum_ to worry about.


	8. Prompt: Grass

This is definitely the most effort I’ve had to put into playing one of my own pokémon.

It was so much easier before she evolved. As a young Foalium, I knew exactly where to tickle the pony pokémon to keep her entertained for hours; all I had to do to make her collapse in a heap of giggling whinnies was brush against her feet, which curved up like scythes from the ends of her legs, making her resemble a toy rocking horse.

Since she evolved, though, those sensitive feet have been replaced by hooves so tough, you could use them to bend iron bars. And though my pokédex insists that she wants to be petted, I’ve yet to find a single area of her body that I can stroke to elicit any reaction other than a bored harrumph. The only spot I haven’t tried yet is her ears, and I was never going to be able to reach them from the ground. I wasn’t going to reach them by climbing up the collection of vines that make up her tail, either, as half a dozen graceless falls had already taught me.

Fortunately, I still have one option left to me. Unfortunately, it’s this one, and it seems like an even stupider idea up here than it did while I was on the ground. I’m lucky that the wind isn’t blowing too strongly, at least. It should be fairly easy for me to land in the right place, since Titantle is floating on the waves of the wind as closely as he can get to my target, at least without whacking anyone with his fin. Even if I don’t miss, though, it’s probably still going to hurt, and I have no idea how I’ll be able to get down again once I get there.

“Ready?” I shout across to Titantle, nervously. Stupid question, really - given that he’s just flown me up here, his part in this has already been done - but Titantle grunts an affirmative anyway. Reassured for no especially good reason, I bend my knees, count to three, and leap from the edge of Titantle’s shell.

Sure enough, my knees buckle painfully as my feet touch down on the wooden boards below, and I have to sit down take a few seconds to wait for them to stop throbbing. This turns out to be just as well, because before I can even try to stand up, the cylindrical wooden surface beneath my feet moves so drastically that it would have flung me over the edge if I’d been standing up. I dig my fingernails into the thin cracks between planks and try to stay calm. The experience is just like when I’m standing behind a pokémon being hit by an Earthquake attack; to stay safe, I just have to stay still and wait it out. Eventually, Cavaltree - the enormous wooden horse pokémon whose back I’m clinging onto - is bound to stop walking.

It might feel as though she’s trying to shake me off, but I don’t think that’s it. In fact, I doubt she’s even noticed I’m up here. A sixty-kilogram teenage girl falling a meter or two from the sky is hardly going to cause a dent in Cavaltree’s incredibly thick wooden skin. According to legend, the grass-type pokémon’s defence stat is so incredibly high that the legendary war between the cities of Ephebe and Tsort lasted centuries, because both sides fought with them and neither side could beat them.[*](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18457460/chapters/43753966#footnote)

With credentials like that, I jumped at the chance to get Foalium to evolve into being my party’s resident tank. It never occurred to me that she might not actually be particularly happy about growing skin so thick that it robs her of the ability to feel anything. If I can’t find a spot where she likes being petted, I’m going to feel incredibly guilty.

Well, it looks like I’m about to find out just how remorseful I should feel; a change in pace below me tells me I’m just about to get my chance to do what I’m here to do. And sure enough, before too long, it seems as though Cavaltree has found a decent place on the route to stop and have something to eat. Since Cavaltree is a grass-type pokémon, this means planting her legs completely still, turning her head towards the sun, and glowing a faint green colour as she photosynthesises. With the surface beneath me still, I push myself onto my feet, walk up to the base of Cavaltree’s neck, and reach up to gently scratch her ears.

Almost immediately, her head jolts upwards with visible surprise. I feel like jumping for joy. I knew she’d be able to feel touch here. I just knew it! They’re the most vulnerable part of her whole body. While the joints of her neck, head and legs are so thick and strong that they just barely allow for any movement at all, the joints connecting her ears to her head have to be much more flexible to let her pick up on the sounds of dangers from any direction, meaning that they can’t be as thick. It stands to reason that -

I try to tell myself. when Cavaltree’s neck jolts backwards, throwing me into the air so that I land spread-eagled on the pokémon’s back, that it's mostly the shock that hurts. I’d certainly rather not believe she’d actually put as much force into pushing me away as the pain in my coccyx would imply. Unfortunately, telling myself this isn’t quite enough to stop tears bubbling up at the corners of my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I shout, more hysterically than I’m proud of, bouncing a fist pathetically against Cavaltree’s back. “Why won’t anything work? Why won’t you let me play with you? Are you sick? Is there something I’ve done wrong in raising you?"

At this point, her huge face turns around as far as it will turn to look at me through the corner of her eyes, and the fear that has motivated me through this entire venture slips out of my mouth.

“Is it just me?” My voice creaks. “Do you just not like me any more?”

I screw my eyes shut after saying the words, partly to will myself not to cry, partly for fear that I might see Cavaltree shaking her head. Maybe that sounds irrational, but I used to have so much fun with this pokémon as a Foalium. What does it say about me as a trainer if I’ve done something to ruin that? How will I be able to trust my instincts if I’ve let one of my favourite pokémon grow up to be unhappy?

After a few moments of silence, I psych myself up, wipe the tears from my eyes, and look up at Cavaltree’s face. This means I can see two curious things about the usually stoic pokémon.

One is that she has clearly been rolling her eyes at her overdramatic trainer for several seconds. The other is that she is jerking her neck backwards again, just like she was when I was scratching her ears. It actually looks like she’s gesturing at something behind me.

I turn around and notice something that wasn’t visible at all from the ground. Just above the roots of her tail-vines, at the point just before the wooden surface of her back becomes the curve of her posterior, it looks like something metallic is glinting in the light of the setting sun. I crawl towards the shining metal, and it looks more and more like some kind of handle. and now I see it that way, the cracks between planks on this side of Cavaltree’s back start to look like some kind of trapdoor.

Hmm.

As I manoeuvre around the pokémon’s back trying to get the handle to shift, I’m reminded once more of that story about Cavaltree being used in the Ephebian-Tsortian war. I was told that story by an old man in Ephebe City, and he hadn’t actually said that both sides fought with the pokémon. I’d chalked it up to a language barrier, but he said that soldiers from both sides fought in them.

The hatch on her back opens. I lower myself inside and gasp.

Cavaltree’s organs must all be crammed into the sides of her body. Once I’ve passed five or six inches of wooden skin, the pokémon’s insides are completely hollow.

I know exactly what to do as soon as I see the inside of the cave that is Cavaltree’s body. Lowering myself even further down, this time into one of the four deep pits at the base of her belly, I reach down to the floor... And rub the inside of the wooden horse pokémon’s feet. The texture feels just like it did when I would tickle her as a young Foalium.

As the floor beneath me starts to shake for the second time today, it dawns on me that I don’t actually know how I’m going to get back out again. But right at the minute, I can’t bring myself to care. I’m kneeling down way inside a pokémon who’s laughing like she’s never laughed before. It feels so good I might never want to leave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *It should be noted that this is probably an oversimplification of the war’s actual events, since Cavaltree’s middling special defence keeps them vulnerable to fire-type attacks, and the ancient Ephebians and Tsortians weren’t stupid. It makes for a nice story, though.[[return to text](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18457460/chapters/43753966#return1)]


	9. Prompt: Poison (a Drabble)

“Sauceitch, miss? You won’t be disappointed,” insists Salesman Dibbler, despite all evidence to the contrary. 

I glance at the poison-type pokémon he’s trying to sell. Its tubular body curves to resemble a miserably frowning mouth, dripping red and yellow liquid which fails to cover its unsightly greenish-grey spots.

“It knows Growth!” Dibbler continues. “Good move, that. Improves any attack you can think of.”

“And what attacks does it know?”

“…It knows growth.”

I smile politely and walk away. “I think I’ll pass.”

“Go on!” the salesman shouts after me. “Five hundred pokédollars, and I’m cutting me own throat!”


	10. Prompt: Ground

After a little deliberation, I decide to return Gochem to their poké ball before I try approaching the hut. I’ve heard the front door appears locked if trainers seem too intimidating, and while Gochem is smaller than the wild creature I’m hoping to see, I don’t feel like the golem pokémon makes me seem more approachable.

Circling the hut, I find myself marvelling at how normal the hut looks. I’d expected at least some sign of what’s inside to be visible from here; maybe a broken window, or a dent in the ceiling, or some kind of crack in the clay at the hut’s base. But no; with the curtains inside drawn, the hut looks completely identical to those in Zambingo Town, just north of here. A little stone step has even been placed on the ground outside to help people get to the front door, which is a nice touch. I wouldn’t have suspected anything was different about the hut at all if it wasn’t wedged between two trees deep in the Howondaland Jungle, at least two miles away from the nearest human.

I finally arrive at the door and give it three brisk taps. After a few moments, I hear a noise that sounds unfortunately like someone trying to learn to play the trombone, which nonetheless sounds somehow like it’s meant to be welcoming. I turn the doorknob and take a few steps back as the door creaks open a few inches.

Another few seconds pass, and then long, bluish-grey tube snakes its way through the slightly- open door. The end of the tube slithers right round the door, grabs hold of the doorknob and tries tugging it further open.

When this doesn’t work, there are a few thunking sounds as something attached to the other end of the tube bashes against the doorframe, causing the door to wildly swing open and closed so rapidly that it’s hard to get a proper look inside.

When this stops happening, the tube lets out a strained “phbbbbbbbvth” noise, and the doorframe bulges oddly, like it’s struggling to stay attached to the rest of the building. Then the entire hut shudders about, detaches from the floor and raises six inches above the ground on four stubby little legs. There are so many groaning noises that it’s hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure I just heard the noise of crashing furniture inside.

Finally, one enormous ear makes it through the door, then the tubular trunk comes out again, and the big, goofily grinning head of the wild Hermiphant has somehow been stuffed through a doorframe half its size.

I grin back and let out Gochem once again. I don’t expect I’ll have to fight the hermit elephant pokémon for long before I can catch her - she’s so large that my Heavy Ball should do the trick fairly soon.

I love this region. Other countries can keep their Voltorb disguised as poké balls; we have pokémon disguised as whole buildings.


	11. Prompt: Rock (a Drabble)

“Hold on,” I say, “You’re saying you beat Celesti Gym with just this?”

It wasn’t surprising that my rival had beaten the psychic gym - his Lippear recently evolved into a Followood, making his Crunch attack a force to be reckoned with. The pokémon in front of me, though, is a Sokker - levitating by rotating its body around its mouth while resembling nothing more than a half-brick in a sock, the fighting/rock type pokémon is weak against psychic-types.

“It wasn’t that well thought out,” admits my exasperated rival. “I was just trying to stop them from fighting me.”


	12. Prompt: Bug

I’m not even halfway to Professor Ridcully’s lab when I’m rushed at by what feels like the twentieth wild pokémon in the last five minutes. I’m starting to think it was a bad idea to take a short-cut across the Unreal Estate, Morpork City’s most diverse pokémon habitat. I haven’t been through here since I was training for my second gym battle, and while I’d remembered it was busy, it didn’t seem quite this dense back then. Then again, last time I was here I got a lot more out of the battles, since my party pokémon weren’t all twenty levels stronger than everything here at the time.

Still, my lead pokémon, Quothe, doesn’t seem at all bored of facing the weaker pokémon. In fact, the raven pokémon - whose signature ability, Carrion Regardless, lets him restore a small amount of health whenever a pokémon near him faints - seems quite excited to be given so many easy sources of sustenance. He eagerly flaps his wings and rushes forward to greet his foe, and looks quite surprised when he can’t actually find the foe in question.

We both look around, perplexed. The wild pokémon is nowhere to be seen. At first I think that she might have run away before the battle even started, but that can’t be it; my pokédex is still happily singing its “you are in a pokémon battle” music. Maybe the pokémon has used Minimize? But surely not, the battle hasn’t even started properly yet...

...And I’ve just noticed the rhythmic thumping noise coming from my belt.

I look down. There’s the wild pokémon, slamming her body repeatedly against a spare Ultra Ball on my belt. I watch the little insect pokémon for a while, fascinated. Oblivious to the idea that she’s being anything but subtle, she’s flying her magenta, milk-bottle-shaped body into the ball like a battering ram, bouncing off, then looking excitedly around to check whether she’s successfully managed to sneak her way inside the ball. When she realises she’s still in the outside world, she turns around and repeats the process from a new angle. The process takes twelve seconds like clockwork, and she never seems any less surprised that it hasn’t worked. It takes a little more than a minute for her to realise she’s being watched, at which point she slowly flutters down to rest its eight legs on the Ultra Ball and stares innocently up at me with three surprisingly stripy blue eyes.

“Bzzgr?” buzzes the Buggoph, hopefully.

I didn’t know anything about Buggoph as a species until I added its data to my pokédex when I was here last, presumably because they started appearing in the wild when I was too young for anyone to comfortably tell me their origin story. Even the information on the pokédex was phrased with careful euphemisms, as there’s nothing like the threat of angry parents of impressionable children to make scientists choose their words carefully.

From what I deciphered, some time ago, there was an abundance of life force in the disc region for about a month, due to the villainous Team Audit trying to destroy some legendary or another. In the midst of this, Professor Ridcully and a handful of other pokémon professors made what the pokédex insists was an entirely intentional experiment combining the fields of etymology and entomology, the study of bug-type pokémon. The end result of this was the creation of Buggoph’s evolutionary line, a series of pokémon called into existence whenever the professors used particularly colourful language during the offending month, with their size and level depending on the strength of swearwords used. Having met Professor Ridcully, I’m surprised that members of the Buggoph family didn’t take over the city.

The one sitting on my Ultra Ball is still looking up at me as though I’m the most interesting thing she’s ever seen in her life. “So you want to get in the Ultra Ball, do you?” I ask, looking back at her middle eye.

“Pizzuvff. Dm-n-blzzt,” she says, nodding. This nod takes a while, since her neck is more than twice the size of her head.

“Well, I’m very flattered, but I’ve already caught a Buggoph,” I explain to her, aware of Quothe snapping his beak impatiently in front of us. Buggoph is pointedly not paying attention, and has instead started to rub herself up and down my arm, her four pairs of wings occasionally jittering against me. The experience is like being cuddled by an electric toothbrush.

“Uzz-hvvvvll,” she hums, affectionately. “Vvvnkr.”

I giggle at the ticklish sensation on my arm and have to concede that, considering that she’s the physical embodiment of a swearword, she’s terrifically friendly. The same cannot be said of the Buggoph I caught some weeks ago. Although the pokémon in question has quite impressive offensive capabilities, I haven’t been able to bring myself to use the mean-spirited creature since he evolved into a Censwore and started bullying my other pokémon. Censwore is a stripy purple and black bug/dragon type creature with a face like a grenade with eyebrows, wings like handsaws, and a body that looks like a cheese grater wrapped around a rudely-shaped parsnip. While I don’t think the Buggoph ascending my arm will be any prettier than him when she evolves, she at least won’t have a personality to match.

...I think I’ve already talked myself round.

“Go on then,” I sigh at Buggoph. “But get to your side of the field first. You’ve got to at least let me pretend catching you was my idea.”

“Zznvvbvtch!” she cheers, doing as she’s told. I hope that excitement doesn’t fade too quickly; Quoth’s disappointed caw tells me it’ll take him a while to stop seeing his new teammate as anything but a snack.


	13. Prompt: Dragon

Oh, gods help me, it’s another Dracwamp.

There have been plenty of pokémon, in my time as a trainer, that I’ve grown to curse the sight of. Some can stretch a simple battle on for what feels like hours by inflicting annoying status conditions. Some places are so crowded with one kind of pokémon that you tire of the pokémon altogether, as though you’ve filled a quota of sorts. Then there are those which are so common everywhere in the region that it’s really hard to get excited for them at all. (Respectively, I’m thinking of Gnoll, which constantly poison and confuse enemies; Literarat, which dance throughout Bad Blitz Town; and the goblin pokémon Ungguan and the rest of its evolution line.)

But the thing that sets Dracwamp apart from those pokémon, at least in my eyes, is that they’re actually not all that common. This marshy route outside the Wyrmberg is the only place they appear, and even here you only come up against about one Dracwamp for every nine other pokemon.

For another thing, they’d probably bring a lot to my team. After all, they’re adorable, in a grubby sort of way. Their huge, colourful eyes; their nostrils, twin cylinders which protrude a good foot in front of their faces; even the way their tiny wings don’t seem to show any purpose apart from being something to flail around when they get excited - all add up to a creature I’d happily cuddle all day, provided I had a way to wash my hands afterwards.

It’s not like they’re incapable of being valuable assets in battle, either - they have some decent offensive properties, and with a few Technical Machines and a little patience, they’re supposed to learn some pretty useful moves. It’s not for nothing that Lady Sybil of the Elite Four is said to have a group of them defending her mansion.

I’m just so sick of them blowing themselves up all the bloody time.

It isn’t even like when you run into a Voltorb and you don’t know from one moment to the next if they might use Explosion. Wild Dracwamp can literally do nothing else. The only move they’re born knowing is Self-Destruct. They learn two moves by level-up; at level twenty-five, they learn Sleep Talk, a move they use exclusively to Self-Destruct while asleep, and at level fifty they learn Explosion, just to have a more efficient way of blowing themselves up. And their famously terrible signature ability, Volatile, makes them automatically explode when hit by Fire-, Electric- or Poison-type moves.

There’s only one thing for it. I let out Glacitrol, the pokémon in my party with the highest defence, and throw a quick ball at the wild pokémon. With any luck, I’ll catch this one and won’t even give it a chance to use the move it’s readying itself up for.

The ball wobbles once... Twice...

Three times -

And breaks open.

I fling myself behind the closest rock. The blast will ring in my ears for the next half hour.


	14. Prompt: ghost

Getting my Eegore to use Shadow Sneak always makes me feel very slightly unnerved. No matter where he is on the field when I ask him to use the move, there’s no sense of movement that leads to him standing inches behind his opponent’s back; the watcher just feels certain that Eegore was there all along, even when their eyes were insisting otherwise even moments before. It feels like a mistake has been made in the fabric of the universe, and that the patchwork pokémon has just for a moment been in two places at once.

Still, maybe a little creepiness is necessary to get by in the Sto Helit Gym. Ghost type gyms aren’t known for being welcoming at the best of times, but something about the fact that the gym is also a primary school makes it much more unsettling. The helpful man giving advice at the front of the gym is a Janitor laden with religious symbols who looks like he hasn’t slept in a month. The gym is filled with chillingly calm Youngsters and Lasses using pokémon that would terrify trainers twice their ages, the most common among them being Bogeyid, which is literally described by the pokédex as “the fear pokémon.” Where any other school would explain the effects of status conditions like sleep or paralysis, the blackboard at the back of the room describes the ten steps to take if you suspect that a pokémon has possessed one of your parents.

And the scariest part of the whole building is Gym Leader Susan, and not just because of the knowledge that she’s responsible for all the rest of it. At first, I had been amazed that so many of the young trainers in the gym, some of whom were only six years old, had more discipline and strength in battle than nearly any of the Veterans and Experts I’ve met on my journey so far. The second I stood here in front of their teacher, all my surprise melted away. If I’d had Susan as my teacher at school, I’d have been a pretty well-trained child myself, in much the same way that I’d have been quite good at running if I’d grown up around a pack of man-eating Houndoom. Ever since this battle started, my self-preservation instincts have been screaming at me that any move I make could turn out to be the stupidest mistake I’ve ever made. If I look too long at her stony face, I can convince myself that I’ve already made it.

This is in spite of the fact that, as far as I can tell, I’m actually doing all right. While starting the battle off with my ghost-type Eegore was a risk I had been very nervous about, since both sides would be super effective against the other, but it seems to have paid off. His Shadow Sneak attack just hit Susan’s Glhour directly in the middle of her hourglass-shaped body, causing the scowling pokémon to drop to the floor and spill a small pile of sand from her right-hand side. Susan, returning Glhour to her poké ball, gives an exasperated sigh, which feels like it drastically lower the temperature of the gym.

“Impressive,” she intones, in a voice that makes me feel like I’ve been called something unpleasant. “And here was me hoping I’d be able to finish this with my more normal pokémon.”

I blink dumbly at Susan. The bulk of Glhour’s body is made up of two floating, sand-filled, teardrop-shaped glass eyes connected at each eye’s thinnest point, with sand visibly flowing horizontally from the core of the left eye to the right with no regard to gravity. Floating a short distance underneath these eyes, being waved about like a limb, is a plaque which psychically appears to have the name of whoever is looking at it monogrammed onto it, an evolutionary defence mechanism which is meant to convince any potential attackers that if they were to do anything to stop the sand from flowing through Glhour’s body, the attacker would surely die. Referring to Glhour as one of her ‘more normal pokémon’ is about the scariest thing Susan could have done.

Apparently oblivious to my reaction, Susan takes out a poké ball with a coloration I’ve never seen before; dark grey on top and white on the bottom, like a regular poké ball would look like in a black- and-white picture. “Ah well,” she says, “I guess we might as well get this over with.” Three deep red lines fade onto her cheek as she throws the ball forwards and says “Go, Squeaper!”

There’s a flash of grey light, and out of the ball comes a creature whose two-foot-tall body is covered in such an intense black colour that it takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust enough to see anything else at all. It’s such an intense colour vacuum that no shading can be seen at all, and it’s too hard to tell whether the blackness is a robe the pokémon is wearing or a part of its actual body. When I am able to see any part of Squeaper with a colour, it’s a yellowish-grey face that looks exactly like the skull of a rattata, sticking out from under a section of darkness that might be either the hood of a robe or a mane of hair. The face technically doesn’t have whiskers - few skulls do - but thin lines on either side of its nose leave the distinct _impression_ of whiskers.

As my eyes adjust more, I see the bones of two tiny hands about halfway up Squeaper’s body, the same yellowish-grey as its face. But its right hand seems smaller than its left, as though some of its bones are missing. No, not missing - covered up; the parts of the hand that I can see are curved around some kind of pole that I can’t, and if it’s blocking out the rest of the hand, that means it’s made of the same impossible darkness as the body behind it. If I squint, and try to imagine the pole extending above that hand, I think I can see a paper-thin blue scythe’s blade curving outwards in the darkness.

And though the gym is deathly quiet, a word enters my brain so forcefully that it makes me imagine that someone has written it on a huge poster, folded it up, and shoved it through my mouth. The word is: SQU-EEEEE-EAK.

My head hurts. I can’t wait to get out of this damned gym.


	15. Prompt: Legendary

If anything, I think it would actually be less disconcerting if the enormous skeletal shapes which give the Castle of Bones its name _weren’t_ made of ice.

That’s an odd thought, because if the castle had lived up to appearances, it would mean it had been built from the ivory remains of an unearthly tusked, humanoid creature the size of a small village. But at least if that had been the case, the scariest creatures involved would be long dead. As it stands, though, I have to live with the knowledge that the legendary beast at the heart of these frozen caverns had created a mountain of eternal ice harder and stronger than any metal, before deliberately sculpting it into looking like a colossal reconstruction of the inside of his own body. And that’s a pretty intimidating thing to know about a creature you’re about to get into a fight with.

It’s an even more intimidating thing to know about a pokémon your mother used to tell you would go down your chimney and leave you presents once a year.

As I clumsily skate my way across a frozen, femur-shaped corridor, I reflect on that a little. It’s not as though I’d expected all the things I’d heard about the creature to be true; if people couldn't take a little artistic licence when recounting legends, nobody would have any fun at all. But even so, it’s jarring to compare my surroundings with the festive stories every child in the region heard on their parents’ laps. There certainly aren’t any halls full of jolly fairy-type pokémon gathered around making toys. Any creature that could be jolly around here wasn’t paying attention.

And as for the creature itself…

I reach the end of the icy arm and sneak a look down into the lower levels of the icy cave, just like I did when I entered through the skull’s mouth. I’m a little closer to him now, which makes it all the easier to see the mythical beast located in the ice skeleton’s pelvis. That’s probably why, even though I’m prepared for what I’m going to see, I still can’t keep myself from gasping at the vision of red and white below me.

Every single picture I’ve ever seen of Hohohog, the legendary Hogfather pokémon, has been simultaneously completely right and completely wrong.

For starters, he’s sitting in his traditional position on a sleigh of frost, behind four mamoswine to pull it. But most department store grottos cut costs by giving some piloswine a little makeup and a pair of plastic tusks, making it easy to forget until they’re in front of you that real mamoswine are… well, mammoth-sized. The four I can see down below are well over eight feet tall. And they barely reach the height of their seated master’s shoulders.

What’s more, he does have the enormous, spherical stomach he’s famous for, but it’s not just the belly of a creature who has thousands of mince pies and glasses of sherry in a single night, or even the kind of muscle that can be built up by carrying a sack full of toys. No, Hohohog’s huge body has the same kind of solid bulk that heavy machinery has. It’s like he’s bursting with such complex bodily functions and tightly-wound power that he’d had to make room for it all by personally cutting out any remotely superfluous organs, from his appendix to his left lung. The resulting impression is that his slightest movement could knock down a small building.

But the biggest fiction that humanity has ever told about Hohohog is the friendly smile stretching out from under his snout on every card he’s ever been drawn on. Hohohog is looking directly up at me right now, and his mouth is certainly curved into a smile, but it has even less warmth than the frozen air between us. Trying to smile pleasantly with teeth that sharp would be like trying to paint a portrait using a battering ram as a brush, and by the gods, he was not trying to smile pleasantly. That smile said one thing and one thing only; I Accept You As A Sacrifice.

In short, everything about Hohohog looks like it’s been specially constructed to scare anything with half a brain into running as far away from him as possible.

Which means that I, apparently, do not have half a brain. I grab hold of a shoulder-blade-shaped stalagmite to swing myself onto a ribcage of ice, grab hold of a couple of rib-rungs, and start climbing down, grateful to be wearing gloves. I couldn’t turn back if I tried.


	16. Prompt: Regional Variant

Wading through the Cloaca Victoria is not an experience that I had been hoping to revisit quite this quickly. I’m willing to bet this is the only region in the world where the Victory Road leading up to the Elite Four takes the form of a long, winding collection of sewers stretching from beneath one end of the capital city to the other, with only the occasional detour through an abandoned dungeon or historical torture chamber to break the unpleasant monotony.

Having met Champion Vetinari, I rather suspect that the horribleness of the road is a deliberate attempt to put off as many potential challengers as possible so that he can focus on what he considers the important part of his job, which is maintaining the orderly and peaceful day-to-day operation of the Disc region. This would explain why I had to wait at the top of the Tower of Art for an hour once I’d battled the Elite Four in order to wait for him to get there from the Ankh City Palace, where he conducts his political business.

I am, of course, back here because if I have any chance of avoiding getting beaten senseless again during my second attempt at facing the champion, I have some serious training to do. And as disgusting as the Cloaca Victoria is, it’s also the home to some of the most dangerous wild pokémon on the disc, at least outside of Fourecks Island. There are no pokémon down here that are below level fifty, from the fire/bug type Innsewer which once historically burned down the whole city from the cellars of the Mended Drum tavern, to the rock-type Gochem which still wander the sewers performing century-old clearance tasks that long-dead masters forgot to tell them to stop doing. They’re satisfyingly challenging creatures to face, but not to the point that I get particularly worried, particularly since my starter pokémon has advantages against most of them.

I’m reminding myself of all this because, right at this moment, I need to be as aware as possible of all the reasons that I shouldn’t pull an escape rope out of my bag and disappear back to the surface. I’ve just finished off a battle against a large Rivurgh, the poison-type evolution to Rankh, which had dripped his way into my path from the river running above this part of the sewers. The creature’s sickly, voluminous mountain of a body - a charming combination of silt, decomposing litter, and a substance that might once have generously been referred to as slime - somehow manages to be even more disgusting than the sewer surrounding it.

As I climb over my fallen foe, however, I curiously notice a dark area in the wall of the sewer up ahead. And as I walk a little closer to the area, I realise that the thing that’s most curious about it is that I shouldn’t find it curious at all. Since the Cloaca Victoria has to feed sewerage from the entire city to the Circle Sea, nearly every street in the enormous city above requires a large pipe of sewage to feed into the road I’m currently squelching my way through. If I were to poke my head down every dark and basically indistinguishable hole in the wall from one end of the sewer to the other, I would run out of clean clothes before I made it halfway through. So what is it about this dark space in the wall that makes it catch my eye?

I make it over to the wall to find the answer to this question in the form of a THUD noise and a blunt pain across the front half of my body. What sets it apart from the other holes is that it’s the only one with an invisible wall blocking the way.

As answers go, I’d have preferred one that didn’t raise several new questions. I stick both hands in front of me to test the invisible barrier, using them to palm various spots along the smooth surface in front of me, looking for any patterns or weaknesses. After several clumsy hand placements, I’m surprised to find a strange sphere shape jutting towards me on the far right of the dark space, and a very small hole just underneath it. It’s not an invisible wall at all - it’s an invisible door.

Something about this situation jogs my memory, and I remember hearing a rumour about a certain pokémon so hated by Champion Vetinari that he rounded them all up and locked them up in the dungeons of the Ankh City Palace. And back on the surface, the Ankh City Palace is about as far from the river as I am right now...

Speaking of the Palace, I found what seemed to be an empty item ball in the Champion’s Oblong Office. I remember finding it tremendously odd that something so seemingly useless could be found in the office of someone so particular about efficiency, and ended up putting it in the free space in my bag to look at earlier. I dig through my bag hurriedly, and after much fumbling, find the item ball in question, and stick my hand inside it. It’s just a hunch, but -

I pick up the invisible key, stick it in the invisible keyhole and turn the invisible doorknob.

On the other side of the door is a small cube, and despite the door appearing to be entirely transparent, the room actually seems fairly well lit now I’m inside it. On the ground in front of me, though, the creatures I was expecting are nowhere to be found - all I can see are shadows. Wondering where they can be coming from, I look up.

The first thing I see, nailed against the wall opposite me a few meters down from the ceiling, is a sign bearing the symbols:

spɹoʍ ǝɥʇ uɹɐǝ˥

Then, a few meters above that, I see the bodies.

If you know what you’re looking for, you can just about tell that the dozen or so creatures hanging from the ceiling used to be Mr. Mime. It’s difficult, though. You have to mentally colour in the bloodless grey skin on their faces and limbs with a pinker tone; ignore the lines of tension and stress which clutter their shrivelled heads to the point that you can barely make out any facial features at all; imagine what those legs might have looked like if they weren’t swelling up around the tight, invisible shackles chaining them in place. Most crucially, to believe you were looking at a Mr Mime, you would have to rearrange the entire middle of their bodies. Where most Mr. Mimes have circular white bodies encircling the iconic pink blobs on their midriff, these bodies have wasted away into nearly nothing. Instead, the small, pink beans that remain of the spheres on their stomachs and at the ends of their arms and legs are connected together only by sinewy tubes of white skin not much thicker than their limbs.

It looks like I won’t be able to fill in this particular page of my pokédex today. An involuntary shudder goes through my entire body, feeling like it’s radiating from my heart outwards. I’ve never seen this many dead pokémon in a room at once, especially ones that look so disconcertingly like humans. The sight makes me feel ill, and leaves me thinking of every interaction I’ve ever had with Champion Vetinari in an entirely new light. how could anyone purposefully let a whole species starve to death down here, even a species as creepy as Mr. Mime? I’d heard Vetinari referred to as a tyrant before, but I’d never HOLY SHIT THEIR EYES JUST OPENED, THEY’RE LOOKING RIGHT AT ME, OH MEW, OH MY GODS -

Ok, this is - oh my - it’s not how it seems. These creatures haven’t just come back from the dead to - bloody hellfire - psychically move the shackles on their legs so they can march towards me while still hanging upside down from the ceiling. This is just what the pokémon are - regional variants of Mr Mime, presumably ghost/psychic type. And it kind of makes sense that, in a region where so many myths involve fairy tales coming to life and attacking people, a pokémon so influenced by pantomime and human performances might evolve to reflect something out of a horror story.

And, yes, the specific way their lips are soundlessly opening and closing is especially disconcerting, but I have to remind myself that certain pokémon have learned to say their own names, in order to appeal to trainers by being like that sports animé. So it’s only natural that a voiceless Mr. Mime facing me and trying to speak would look like it was reaching towards my brain and mouthing “miiiiiiiine.”

...Although come to think of it, I don’t think Mr. Mimes in particular _do_ say their own names...

Sod this; my pokédex can wait. Turning on my heel, I leg it out of the dungeon and slam the invisible door behind me, double- and triple-checking that it’s locked. I have never identified more with the region's tyrannical Champion in my life.


	17. Prompt: Trainer Class (Watchmen)

“Well, well, well,” intones the larger or the two watchmen proceeding towards me. “What exactly do we have here, then?”

I smile at the two men, groaning inwardly. Though I know for a fact that the Watch consists of several dozen people of various species working under the Elite Four to make the disc a safer place, I nevertheless tend to run into the same people whenever I apprehend any of the villainous teams here. Sometimes, I’ll see Captain Angua, a remarkably efficient and observant officer who will make sure to share her information with me whenever it might be useful, and who has never failed to make it easier to stop the schemes of those prone to scheming.

Other times, however...

“Hi, Fred. Hi, Nobby,” I say, waving at the two men. “Am I to take it that you’re here to apprehend the Team Crown members we have here?”

“Oho, sarge,” says Corporal Nobbs, the shorter and significantly grubbier of the two men. “We’ve got a wily one here. Reckons she can pin it all on her compatriots just ‘cos she’s the only one left standing.”

“That’s right, Nobby,” Sergeant Colon nods, theatrically. “Thinks she can jump out of her Team Crown uniform and slip away free as the odd one out. Well, we’re smarter than that. We’re not just going to let you go without proof that you're not one of them.”

“Well, if you’re after proof, you could ask any of the dozen or so hostages I just freed.” Behind me, an Office Worker with tape over her mouth nods enthusiastically.

“Unreliable witnesses,” Explains Colon, sagely. “Intimidation is a powerful tool.”

“....And I do know that you've been here for at least twenty minutes, hiding behind that pillar and waiting for me to beat Crown Admin Cruces,” I continue, resisting the urge to roll my eyes.

“And we’re supposed to take that at face value, are we?” demands Nobby, without missing a beat.

“Unthinkable,” Colon tuts, shaking his head. “How would we look if word got out that all a criminal had to do to get away from us is to stage a twenty-four minute fight with a uniformed scapegoat? You can’t pull the wool over our eyes that easily.”

The straight face I’ve been pulling dissolves into a disbelieving smirk. “I’m sorry, but you must know this is ridiculous. We’ve been through this exact conversation the last five times you’ve caught me stopping a villainous team. You know I’m not one of them."

“Yes, but...” There’s a rather unsubtle pause, during which Sergeant Colon’s lips move as he sorts his story out in his head. Eventually, he continues, “But that was then, see. Commander Vimes tells us we’re not supposed to let our work be affected by pre-con-ceived ideas based on personal experiences. that'd be discrimination, see, cause anyone can be a criminal.”

“S’true, that, sarge,” Nobby agrees. “You know my mate, Arsonist Kev? He got arrested last week. Could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out.”

“Can’t trust anyone,” says Colon, reaching for the poké ball at his belt. “And that, young miss, is why we’ll have to apprehend you in the name of the law.”

I sigh, defeatedly. It’s not that fighting these two is ever particularly challenging, it’s just that it’s so frustrating having to face them when I’ve already just exhausted myself taking down Team Crown.

I know why they do this, of course. See, if Nobby and Colon were to take the defeated members of Team Crown back to the watch house while their pokémon don’t have a scratch on them, it’ll be clear that the two of them didn’t do a damn thing, which would be terribly embarrassing for them. On the other hand, these villainous teams tend to fight rough, so Colon and Nobby taking them on themselves might put them in harm's way, and would almost certainly generate unnecessary paperwork. But if they wait for me to take out our mutual enemies before fighting me themselves, they get to avoid being in any actual danger, while still being able to honestly say that they apprehended a powerful opponent and witnessed the downfall of Team Crown, and bring back two unconscious Pokémon as proof.

By coincidence, I managed to overhear them recounting the story of our last encounter a week or two ago, when I was passing by the Ankh-Morpork Watch House. I was fascinated to find that, when they aren’t accusing me of being the front line of the forces of evil, they actually sound very fond of me, and talk about my achievements with very generously positive embellishments. Maybe they’re grateful that I basically do their jobs for them.

Our pre-fight conversation over, Colon sends out his elderly Gumshoos, and Nobby sends out Siggarunt, a poison-type pokémon who looks a little like a flat-faced Growlithe made of discarded dog-ends. I send out Gochem and ask him to use Earthquake. It’s the quickest battle I’ve taken part in all day.

The two Watchmen withdraw their unconscious pokémon, looking satisfied. “Well, that takes care of that, anyway.”

“Oh, yeah?” I ask, a smile playing on my lips. “I’m not a threat to the public anymore, then?”

“Course not,” Colon agrees, looking offended at the prospect. “You’re far too strong for that.”

"S'true. ‘Cause baddie teams are always trying to destroy the pokémon world, aren’t they?” Nobby adds. “And we’re still here. Therefore, the baddie teams can’t be all that strong. Stands to reason.”

“Right,” I say, silently chuckling. I wish I’d had that confidence in the power of good over evil when I’d been facing the team in question, who actually caused me quite a bit of difficulty.

“Anyway, we won’t keep you any longer,” says Colon, kindly. “We can see you’ve been very busy round here. Well done, by the way.”

“No problem, Fred,” I half lie. “See you next time.”

“And good luck with the pokémon league,” Nobby shouts after me. “I’ve got a tenner on you being the next Champion.”

"Good thing I turned out not to be a terrorist, then!" I reply. He pretends not to have heard me.


	18. Bonus: Nanny Ogg's Favourite Song

You might have your way with a Sandshrew, my lad,  
But you won’t be as lucky when faced with his dad.  
Tell someone you tried and you’re sure to appall,  
For the Sandslash can never be buggered at all.

You can ride a Pignite if you’re up for a fight,  
And a Machamp as well if you handle it right,  
If you try with a Tauros, be ready to fall,  
But the Sandslash can never be buggered at all.

You can bother a Blaziken if you are bold,  
Or a Piloswine if you’re not scared of the cold.  
A Pidgey can only be done by the small,  
But the Sandslash can never be buggered at all.

A Gengar will curse, but it won’t be the worst,  
And you’ll have to buy dinner for Gardevoir first,  
A Drowzee or Hypno might answer your call,  
But the Sandslash can never be buggered at all.

Any Tom, Dick, or Jack might give Onix a crack  
Though you’d have to be fit just to climb on his back.  
You may even get on a Steelix with gall,  
but the Sandslash can never be buggered at all.

Find a legend’ry ‘mon and try getting it on  
And you might have some luck if you find the right one,  
You can take Arceus up her Origin Hall,  
But the Sandslash can never be buggered at all.

Whether you’re in a cave or in grass that is tall,  
With creatures aplenty you might have a ball,  
But the Sandslash can never, the Sandslash can never,  
The Sandslash can never be buggered at all!


End file.
